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France Asks Airlines to Cut Flights Ahead of Strikes

Workers blocked fuel storage depots in Caen, in northwestern France, on Monday to protest pension reform. Labor unions have called for national work stoppages on Tuesday.Credit
Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — Weeks of protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s efforts to change France’s pension system were intensifying Monday in advance of a final parliamentary vote. But with approval expected, Mr. Sarkozy faces the possibility that winning will not offer much political gain.

Labor unions called for national work stoppages on Tuesday, adding to the disruption that has been building since the first national protest strike on Sept. 7 and that has worsened with strikes at oil refineries now in their second week. Trains have been canceled, commuters stranded and gas stations mobbed. Violent clashes have broken out. The civil aviation authority asked airlines to cut flights into French airports by as much as half.

Presenting himself as a champion of necessary change, Mr. Sarkozy had proposed the measures to help wrest France from the economic doldrums gripping many parts of Europe and to reverse years of declining fortunes before elections in 2012. He holds a majority in both houses of Parliament. With a Senate vote set for Wednesday and lower house approval already in hand, he believes he can bank on success for the changes, which include increasing the minimum age of retirement by two years to 62.

But in fact, it is a high-stakes gamble magnified by the political arena in which it is played out.

“He has a clear majority in the two houses, so he has no difficulty in passing the reform,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder of the news Web site Rue89. “But that does not give him legitimacy with the public.”

At worst, Mr. Haski said in a telephone interview, the upshot could be that Mr. Sarkozy emerges from the crisis as a lame-duck president for the next two years. “It is a question of legality versus legitimacy,” he said.

Mr. Sarkozy, who was aiming to be able to present himself for the next two years as a courageous reformer in the national interest, may instead end up with the image of an elitist imposing unwanted reforms on the poor. A widely quoted survey in Le Parisien on Monday said 71 percent of respondents either supported or were sympathetic to the strikers. The telephone poll of 1,002 people was conducted Oct. 15 and 16.

“The government can win it despite threats of violence in the street, despite shortages, or simply by a vote of Parliament,” said Jérôme Sainte-Marie, who heads the polling institute C.S.A. “But these 71 percent translate into the cost of victory: It will be very high.”

He added, “We are looking at a direct confrontation between public opinion and the president of the republic.”

Neither does Mr. Sarkozy have much room for retreat.

“He has gambled his prospects of victory on these reforms,” said Mr. Haski, the Rue89 co-founder.

The labor unions, though far from united, have exacted an enormous toll. Already, the blockades of France’s 200 fuel depots and strikes at most of its 12 refineries have left service stations starved of fuel. Fearful that the pumps would run dry, many drivers scrambled to fill up on Monday while they could, contributing to the pressure on supplies, particularly of the diesel fuel powering many French cars.

The government said that only 2 percent of the country’s 13,200 service stations had actually run dry. But other estimates put the number of gas stations running out of some or all types of fuel at 10 to 15 percent.

Aad Van Bohemen, who heads the emergency policy division at the International Energy Agency, said France had been forced to reach into its 30-day emergency supplies of fuel at depots because of the strikes at the refineries.

“The question is how to get it to the pumps,” he said in a telephone interview. “Some depots are blocked, but there’s a lot of panic-buying going on among the French people.”

On Monday, half of France’s high-speed train services were canceled. A spokeswoman for Air France said that at least two long-haul flights from Paris, to Seattle and Mumbai, had taken off with insufficient fuel, requiring refueling stops en route.

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East of Paris, oil industry workers used blazing tires to prevent access to a refinery. On highways near Lille, in the north, and Lyon, in the south, truckers and protesters snarled traffic.

In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, riot police officers fired tear gas at about 300 high school protesters who had set fire to a car, wrecked bus stops and hurled rocks, witnesses said. The authorities said disturbances were reported on Monday from 261 of the country’s 4,300 high schools, slightly fewer than in the unrest on Friday.

But the protesters are fighting the clock. Many analysts said that they believed high school students would begin disappearing from the streets as school vacations that start Friday approached.

Nicola Clark and Scott Sayare contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2010, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Even as Protests Intensify, Sarkozy Assumes the Political Risks of Reform. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe